RTI Hits the Xcelerator

It’s a scorching mid-August afternoon on the RTI International campus as construction workers put the finishing touches on the nonprofit’s newest facility. 

The RTI Pilot Xcelerator is tucked away in the institute’s 180 acres in the Research Triangle Park. But at more than 40 feet high, the metal structure is nearly impossible to miss once you’re inside the gated campus. It looks like a massive carport or a farmers market pavilion. 

The ceiling holds a “spine” of pipes that runs the length of the shelter, carrying compressed air, gases like hydrogen and nitrogen, and cooling water.

The setup provides easy connection points for modular systems of pipes and machinery, known in manufacturing as skids. RTI expects startups, as well as larger industrial companies and even the federal government, to use the space to test fledgling technologies in sectors including energy, chemicals, and biotechnology.

The arrangement will be similar to a coworking hub: RTI will furnish the top-of-the-line, high-tech space for clients, eliminating the need for companies to build their own expensive infrastructure and allowing them to scale up and get to market faster. Clients will also gain access to engineering and commercialization experts from RTI. The approach, the institute posits, can help companies avoid the so-called valley of death—the gap between successful research and commercial deployment where promising innovations often stall.

It’s not a new idea for RTI; it opened a smaller space more than a decade ago and has helped several clients, including in the sustainable aviation fuel and advanced recycling industries. But RTI thinks the expanded Pilot Xcelerator, which opens September 10 and cost $14 million, will attract a wider range of companies. RTI says it’s the only facility of its kind in North Carolina and one of just a few in the nation.

More than 40 companies have expressed interest in using the space in coming years, according to David Dausch, vice president of engineering and advanced technology at RTI. The U.S. Department of Energy is providing $5.5 million for two projects at the site that will test new technologies for converting natural minerals into materials for manufacturing and for recycling cardboard. (The expansion can host up to eight projects at one time, in addition to three at the existing site.)

The new project could also help RTI boost its revenue from commercial clients at a crucial time.

Founded in 1958 as the park’s first tenant, the institute has long aimed to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems and improve the quality of life through its research on the environment, education, health, and agriculture. The nonprofit long counted the federal government as its top client, which made it ripe for disruption as the Trump administration targeted research funding. 

RTI has been described as “ground zero” of the cuts and laid off hundreds of workers in their wake last year. The shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development and cuts to the National Institutes of Health hit particularly hard; the nonprofit has received about $122 million from the NIH this year, per RTI spokesperson Kerry Branon, compared with nearly $400 million two years ago.

CEO Tim Gabel told The News & Observer last year that, amid the changes, he believed RTI needed to emphasize its commercial, private sector work and direct some of its focus to “go-to-market” tactics in sectors like energy and health. At an Assembly Newsmakers event last summer, he said the federal disruption had also pushed RTI to expand its work in agricultural technology and the defense sector, as well as to grapple with the uses and impacts of artificial intelligence.

In an interview last month, Gabel said RTI wouldn’t abandon its longstanding research mission. Still, the expansion of the Pilot Xcelerator, or RPX, is emblematic of one way it’s diversifying its portfolio at a pivotal point.

“I’m as confident as I’ve ever been in RTI’s future. I think there’s so much need for what we do, and so much opportunity for what we do,” Gabel said. “And I think the RPX is a real exemplar, frankly, of what the institute of the future will do more of, in terms of that kind of a platform that’s really an accelerant of science.”

Mitigating the ‘Valley of Death’

Aether Fuels was running into a challenge.

In a lab and a pilot plant facility near Chicago, the startup had successfully demonstrated a three-step proprietary technology, dubbed Aether Aurora, that turns carbon waste from many sources into sustainable aviation fuel. The company is one of many developing new ways to make cleaner fuel as the aviation industry seeks to lower carbon emissions.

The process can currently produce about a gallon per day, Aether Chief Technology Officer Dhaval Shah said. To get the technology to the commercial market, though, the company would need to show it can produce one barrel per day. Aether was able to scale up the equipment for two steps of the process on its own. But to integrate all three steps, it needed a Fischer-Tropsch reactor—which converts carbon monoxide and hydrogen into liquids—bigger than what was available in Chicago.

RTI is one of the few facilities that has one.

Last summer, Aether announced it would partner with RTI to test the full process at scale. Building its own barrel-per-day Fischer-Tropsch unit would have been expensive and taken a long time—a possible death knell in innovation.

“At this stage of Aether’s growth, speed and execution are critical,” Shah said. “We had the technical capability to build the infrastructure ourselves, but leveraging an established ecosystem at RTI allowed us to move significantly faster and keep our team focused on advancing and scaling our core technology.”

That’s central to what RTI hopes to help its Xcelerator clients achieve. “The quicker you can demonstrate something, the better valuation you will have, and your investors are also happier because they now see that your risk is reduced greatly,” said Sameer Parvathikar, program director at the Pilot Xcelerator.

Other companies may join the Xcelerator earlier in their development processes.

“I like to say that if you have an idea you wrote down on a napkin, you can come to us and we will help you turn it into a reality,” Parvathikar said.

Two other companies have used the facility to demonstrate their own processes to make sustainable aviation fuels. Another client is testing a technology that transforms greenhouse gases into chemicals like methanol that could be used in a wide range of industries, and one is turning textile waste into sustainable materials that can be used in things like cement and asphalt. 

Startups may be particularly drawn to the space, but they’re not the only companies RTI expects to use it.

“If you wanted to make a bet and you’re a big company and you didn’t want to invest a whole lot of capital into it, this would be the place to come,” said site manager Matthew Cooper.

Clients sign customized commercial agreements, Dausch said, which include fees for using the facility and technical services, as well as access to RTI experts. The latter was a draw for Aether, Shah said, which is working with on-site RTI staff.

“We have all of the expertise, infrastructure of engineering, all of this available to help them translate to the next scale,” Parvathikar said.

In addition to work bays, the space includes four observation rooms where teams can control and monitor their experiments and collect and analyze data. It also includes indoor workspaces, a high-tech conference room, kitchenette, and shower facilities. 

The amenities are key given that many of the tests will need to run at all times of day, sometimes for weeks or months on end.

“I’ve spent a long time in the pilot world, and usually you’re stuck in some little corner of a plant somewhere,” said Cooper, who previously held positions at Durham-based Burt’s Bees and its parent company, Clorox. “This is the first place I’ve seen that’s purpose-built for engineers and scientists to do their work, and thought about in such a way that it is comfortable to do the kind of things that you would do on a 24/7 operation.”

A Changing Research Environment

For a nonprofit best known for its public-sector work, helping private companies take their products to market may seem like a turn. But Gabel noted RTI has long worked with the private sector, citing its collaborations with pharmaceutical companies as an example. 

The Trump administration has also shown interest in reworking the federal research environment to incentivize partnerships between researchers and industry. 

In March 2025, Trump wrote that the country needed to “accelerate research and development, dismantle regulatory barriers, strengthen domestic supply chains and manufacturing, spur robust private sector investment, and advance American companies in global markets.” In a July report, Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios outlined a sweeping vision that was met with mixed reactions from lawmakers and researchers. The National Science Foundation is also testing new waters for applied research through its X-Labs initiative, which will reward teams that successfully scale their discoveries into commercial technologies.

Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals and a former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said expanding the Pilot Xcelerator appears to be a shrewd move for RTI given the direction the federal government is pushing research. 

“If I were RTI, I would be looking at that not so much in terms of how much money is going to move immediately, but as a window into what the administration’s general plan is,” Thorp said.

Gabel said RTI is “casting a vision” for its future. That will always include conducting research with funding from federal, state, and local governments, he said, noting that go-to-market tactics are “necessary, but not sufficient” to achieve RTI’s aspiration of improving the well-being of billions of people around the globe. In all of its work, Gabel said, RTI prioritizes clients that want to contribute to that effort.

“We will never take on work that we don’t feel is mission-aligned,” Gabel said. “Full stop.”

Still, the Xcelerator represents a new path.

“I don’t think this will be the last type of this sort of thing that we do,” Gabel said. “I think what we’re going to see is the spawning off of other such platforms in key, critical areas that allow us to bring into our community, on our campus, collaborators, scientists from other organizations, funders, investors, and so forth.”

As the facility neared completion in August, Cooper was bullish about the possibilities the space could offer.

“This has the potential for life-changing science, right out of here,” he said. “We have the team, we have the infrastructure, we have the support to take it from an idea to the world.”